“What the fuck?” James mumbled, rising to his feet.
The room around him was completely different now. For one thing, all the furnishings had completely disappeared. James was simply sprawled out across a sparse, barren floor. The room itself was smaller than before, but well lit and quite clean.
As James rose to his feet, he discovered the next big shock of this strange new reality.
He was a girl.
He was also a considerably shorter, thinner person than he had been. The color of his skin seemed to have lightened as well. He was now wearing a long, navy skirt, a pair of white, loose fitting knee socks, and black maryjanes. A white blouse was on his torso. James could feel long, straight hair brushing against the back of his neck as he looked about examining his new self.
“Why am I a girl now?” he whispered.
Then he discovered big shock number three.
James was no longer speaking English. The words that came from his lips, in fact the very words that composed his thought processes right now, were Japanese – not English.
And as soon as he had uttered something aloud in this strange tongue that he suddenly spoke with the fluency of a native, James had become fully aware of the non-English nature of his words.
“I'm in some weird, parallel universe where … what? I'm a Japanese schoolgirl?!” he pondered, staring down at the skirt wrapped about his legs and the tiny but firm, perky breasts pushing up from beneath his blouse.
As he prepared to leave the room though, James happened to spot something that immediately kindled his interest. A textbook sat neatly propped up in the corner of the room, as though someone here had just been studying from it. The title read: Hokubei-ken no zukai no rekishi – The Illustrated History of the North American Prefectures.
“What sort of strange new world is this?” wondered James.
Sitting down in a chair James looked at what presumably was his own school book and started reading.
Evidently, in this version of reality the United States of America no longer existed as James remembered it. The nation was now called Kitaamerikashu and was a puppet state controlled, just like the rest of the western hemisphere, by Imperial Japan. The former United States was now populated by the descendants of several waves of wealthy Asian settlers who had re-colonized North America, seizing it from the Americans in much the same way as European settlers had taken the land from the Native Americans. Caucasians were now poor second-class citizens in this strange, new world. Having come from an educated, middle class family before, the only way James could have maintained a semblance of his prior life was to have been transformed into someone of Japanese heritage.
“And apparently a girl, too!” he laughed, again looking down at himself, this time with more humor than shock. He sat in a most unladylike fashion, with his legs comfortably spread wide from his chair and his skirt draped between, almost like a blanket. He might have been granted the ability to speak Japanese in this new reality, but he had certainly not gained any of his analog's feminine poise or mannerisms.
James continued to read more and more, becoming thoroughly engrossed in this weird, alternate history, delving deeper into the timeline of the textbook he read.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in 1938 leaving America with a severely weakened military when Britain needed help.
Which resulted in Japan and Germany winning World War II by 1944. That much came as no great surprise by this point. The Nazis had conquered all of Europe with the exception of Italy. The Italians in turn ruled North Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean. The Japanese somehow had seized not just all of Asia and Oceania but both Americas!
When the US Navy was destroyed it only took 2 months for Japan to start occupying mainland US. Franklin D. Roosevelt with his military collapsed and Japan moving Eastward across land, yielded to Japanese occupation of the United States to restore order. Forty divisions of Japanese troops were shipped to America. And although a brief civil war had ensued, the Japanese had won and President Roosevelt's power had been cemented.
Only now, he owed allegiance to the Japanese.
World War II finally ended in 1944 when Dr. Yoshio Nishina oversaw the Ni-Go Project – Japan's version of a German atomic bomb. It's successful use against a pair of small, Alaskan towns marked the end of World War II, as well as the end of any meaningful resistance in puppet states like America. The new nation was to throw its doors open to wealthy Japanese emigres, who would be given free homes and land as well as cushy government jobs in exchange for relocating to the new world.
The rest of history read like a strange, wonderland of Buck Rogers style science fiction with everything but flying cars! The new owners of America were wealthy, highly educated, technophiles who pushed grand, new industrial innovations upon their new homeland. High-speed monorails were built, electronics research was strongly funded, automated factories run by robots were produced, blazing fast computers were developed, space travel blossomed, and the world had quickly become a technological utopia.
The first satellite "Sonnenschein" had gone up in 1952. Man had landed on the moon in 1957. Manned exploration of the asteroid belt had started in 1979. A plethora of permanently occupied space stations dotted Earth's orbit now, and seven small lunar cities existed in self-sufficiency on the surface of the moon.
The medical advances as well were astounding. A cancer cure had been developed back in 1973! Cloning techniques now enabled a severed limb to be re-grown. Genetic engineering advances had eliminated a host of a congenital diseases. The common cold still existed, but that seemed to be about the only disease this world hadn't yet eradicated!
“Maybe this world isn't so bad after all,” James said to himself … in Japanese, with a high-pitched girlish voice, he noted silently.